5 Things to Know About Satya Nadella

Satya Nadella will replace Steve Ballmer as Microsoft's next CEO. Here are a few things you might not know about the exec.

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Confirming last week's rumors, Satya Nadella, executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise group at Microsoft, has been chosen to succeed Steve Ballmer as the next CEO of Microsoft.

In August, Ballmer announced plans to step down within 12 months while Redmond searched for his replacement. Since then, there was speculation about high-profile candidates like Ford chief Alan Mulally and former Nokia chief Stephen Elop but Microsoft today officially went with Nadella. Founder Bill Gates will also step down from his chairman role and serve as Nadella's adviser.

"Satya is a proven leader with hard-core engineering skills, business vision and the ability to bring people together," Gates said in a statement. "His vision for how technology will be used and experienced around the world is exactly what Microsoft needs as the company enters its next chapter of expanded product innovation and growth."

Not too much is known about Nadella, partly because he's had the sort of nose-to-the-grindstone jobs at Microsoft that have left him out of the spotlight. But he also not particularly active on social media; his Twitter has been ignored since 2010 and his avi is still an egg. In a "Meet the CEO" bio put out today, Nadella talks about his passion for cricket and how he too eagerly signs up for online classes to pursue the "crazy ambitions in the 15 minutes I have in the morning. You know, I'm trying to listen to a neuroscience class or something. I kind of ask myself, why are you doing it? But I love it."

So what else do we know about Nadella?

1. He didn't stand out early on.

"Truth be told, there was nothing spectacular about Satyanarayana Nadella, registration number 8419218," begins a Times of India story about his college years at Manipal Institute of Technology. The school's director, who taught him 25 years ago, could not recall him but said his records show he was a "first-class student."

2. He's been busy behind the scenes at Microsoft.

He built out Dynamics, the company's customer-relationship-management and enterprise-resource-planning business; online services, including Bing; and cloud services.

3. His leadership skills come from what he's learned from his bosses, including Ballmer, and his cricket coach at Hyderabad Public School (HPS).

"Perhaps more than anything, I think playing cricket for HPS taught me more about working in teams and leadership that has stayed with me throughout my career," Nadella said in an interview with the Deccan Chronicle. "There was this one particular incident in a match where my school captain noticed I was bowling some really ordinary stuff. He took over the next over himself, got our team the much-needed breakthrough and then threw the ball back to me in the next over! I will never forget that. What made him do that? Is this what they call leadership? These are the kind of questions I have since reflected on as I approach many of the things I do today leading teams."

4. As someone who's gone against Google's lead business, he sees a future that's all about data.

"This notion of being able to collect all data, to be able to reason about data, and have this ambient intelligence that's powering every experience I think is what we will see through in the next 10 years," Nadella said at the LeWeb conference last month.

5. He shares Salman Rushdie's literary tastes.

Nadella likes the book All About H. Hatterr by G.V. Desani. The tale of a man's search for enlightenment was long out of print, though it was praised by Salman Rushdie as the progenitor of modern literature in India.

For more, check out PCMag Live in the video below, which discusses Nadella.

Chandra is senior features writer at PCMag.com. She got her tech journalism start at CMP/United Business Media, beginning at Electronic Buyers' News, then making her way over to TechWeb and VARBusiness.com. Chandra's happy to make a living writing, something she didn't think she could do and why she chose to major in political science at Barnard College. For her tech tweets, it's ChanSteele.
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